Not Nice

Maurice Sendak and the perils of childhood.

Maurice Sendak, the writer and illustrator, can usually be found in one of two places in Ridgefield, Connecticut: in the studio off the kitchen in his eighteenth-century clapboard farmhouse, where he works most days, or a quarter of a mile away, in a small, two-story red barn he built ten years ago, which doubles as a second studio, and where he prefers to meet people he doesn’t know very well. My first meeting with him was in the barn. I took a taxi from the train station, through snow-bleached woods, until the road became a dirt road. The taxi dropped me off in front of the barn, but when I knocked there was no answer. I had been told that the door would be open. It was locked. I waited, alone in the woods. About fifteen minutes later, a man appeared, wearing a long, buttoned-up shearling overcoat. He had gray hair, a cropped gray beard, and large, slightly slanted agate eyes. He walked with a cane and was accompanied by a German shepherd, like a man in a fairy tale. He put out his hand and said, “I’m Maurice Sendak.” We went inside the barn, where it was a bit warmer, but we kept our coats on: the implication was that I might not be staying long.

On the floor was a round hooked rug with the face of a Wild Thing picked out in green-gold wool. Over the sink, instead of a mirror, was a pen-and-watercolor sketch of Little Bear flying across a moonlit landscape. By the north window was a bookcase painted a pale blue and filled with literature—Henry James, Melville, Shakespeare—the spines neatly aligned. (Later, Sendak told me, “Even my loneliness is organized.”) When I went to look, Sendak said, “Now that I’m old, I am reading more seriously. I can read Emily Dickinson now. It’s a relief and a privilege. This fall, I reread ‘The Winter’s Tale.’ It turns out that the dead are not dead. Perdita, the lost girl, grows up in Bohemia. My hair stood on end.” He pointed out a dilapidated wrought-iron bench that had belonged to his parents. He said, “My brother and sister and I sat on that bench and listened to ‘Let’s Pretend’ on the radio. ‘How do we get to Pretend Land?’ And a little boy would say, ‘Let’s go on a boat!’ We’d stare at the radio.”

Sendak asked if I would like to take a walk. The winter had been mild, but the cold weather had returned. As we went up the road, he said, looking at an early patch of skunk cabbage, wilted by the frost, “Dummkopfs. You’d think they’d learn. Nobody learns!” When Sendak was young, his good looks were saturnine—he resembled the pop singer Eddie Fisher—but now, at seventy-seven, he looks more like his drawing of the winged servant, for Isaac Bashevis Singer’s story “Fool’s Paradise.” (Sendak likes to say that his parents didn’t take him seriously until he illustrated Singer, in 1966.)

Sendak published his first work in 1947, an illustration for “Atomics for the Millions,” which was written by his high-school physics teacher. He drew molecules doing the Lindy Hop, and made a hundred dollars. Since then, he has illustrated more than a hundred books, including “Little Bear,” by Else Holmelund Minarik, the first “I Can Read Book”; “The Animal Family,” by the poet Randall Jarrell; “The Juniper Tree,” a collection of Grimm fairy tales, translated by Lore Segal and Jarrell; and “I Saw Esau,” a collaboration with the British nursery-rhyme scholars Iona and Peter Opie. His style encompasses homely thumbnail sketches and detailed drawings that have their roots in the work of Cranach and William Morris. When he began illustrating, he said, he was asked, “ ‘Where are your blond children? They look like dumbfounded immigrants!’ Which they were.” But it is the handful of children’s books that he has both written and illustrated that constitute his autobiography. The best known of these is “Where the Wild Things Are,” a book about a tantrum and a time-out, published in 1963. When Max, a boy dressed in a white wolf suit, is sent to bed without supper, his room becomes a forest, an ocean swells outside his window, and a boat takes him to a land where the Wild Things are—lumpish creatures who roll their eyes and gnash their teeth, and were based on Sendak’s own relatives in Brooklyn. Max stares the Wild Things down; they anoint him king; and he reigns until, lonely and a little hungry, he sails home to find his supper waiting for him.

Like every Sendak story, “Where the Wild Things Are” explores his preoccupations, chief among which are the vicissitudes of his own childhood, and the temerity and fragility of children in general. His narrative is almost always about a child in danger whose best defense is imagination. The book editor Michael di Capua, who has worked with Sendak for more than forty years, calls this “the story.” In September, Scholastic will publish Sendak’s first pop-up book, “Mommy?,” about a baby who finds himself in the wrong house, and defeats one monster after another. “ ‘Mommy?’ is the story again!” di Capua says. The cartoonist Art Spiegelman told me, “Maurice reinvented what a children’s book is: it’s a book.”

HarperCollins, Sendak’s longtime publisher, estimates that there are about seventeen million copies of “Where the Wild Things Are” in circulation. Its success has allowed Sendak to pick and choose his projects: “Max is a useful child. What other four- or five-year-old allows his father to stay home and sulk?”

In the last two decades, Sendak has turned his attention increasingly to the theatre. For more than fifteen years, he was engrossed in a collaboration with the opera director Frank Corsaro; their work together included Mozart’s “The Magic Flute,” Janáček’s “The Cunning Little Vixen,” and an opera version of “Where the Wild Things Are.” With the writer and director Arthur Yorinks, he started the Night Kitchen Theatre; “Mommy?” began as a stage piece there. As an artist, too, he has veered away from the territory of children’s literature. In 1993, he illustrated the rhyme “We Are All in the Dumps with Jack and Guy,” inspired, he said, by a trip to Los Angeles where he saw children living on the street; the pictures incorporate headlines about the AIDS epidemic. He has illustrated books for adults, among them Melville’s “Pierre” and “Penthesilea,” a homoerotic classical tragedy by Heinrich von Kleist.

After the publication of “Where the Wild Things Are,” the Times’ art critic described Sendak as “one of the most powerful men in the United States,” because he “has given shape to the fantasies of millions of children—an awful responsibility.” Those children have now grown up. As a boy, the novelist Dave Eggers, who, with the director Spike Jonze, is adapting “Where the Wild Things Are” for the screen, wanted to be an illustrator, and one way he taught himself to draw was by copying the pictures in that book. “I read it and grew up on it and was scared by it. Max is in peril all the time,” he told me. “I know now that Maurice also feels himself to be imperilled. But I don’t think Maurice feels comfortable being safe. And I don’t think he wants his work to be thought of as harmless.” The playwright Tony Kushner read Sendak’s books as a child, and he told me, “I wanted to be Maurice Sendak.” They are now friends; Sendak played a rabbi in the HBO production of Kushner’s “Angels in America,” and Kushner wrote the text for the follow-up volume to Selma G. Lanes’s “The Art of Maurice Sendak.” He also collaborated with Sendak on the book and the opera “Brundibar.” “Brundibar” and a companion opera, “Comedy on the Bridge,” directed by Tony Taccone, premièred at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre last November; they open at the New Victory Theatre, in New York, later this month.

A few weeks after we met, I drove with Sendak from Ridgefield to New Haven for the first preview performance of “Brundibar” at the Yale Repertory Theatre (it played there in February and March). Sendak gave up driving several years ago, and Yale had sent a limousine to take him to the opera. Sendak said, “I wanted to be Mozart, but here I am, a wizened old Jew in the back of a hearse!” He looked out the dark window and said, “It was accepted, in my family, that everyone was nuts. My brother had his tonsils out, and after that he was convinced that the radiator pipes in the living room were going to fall on him. For me, it was the Lindbergh baby. A goyishe child with German shepherds to protect him—I thought the solution had been to be a goyishe child. My fear is ancient.” (In Sendak’s 1981 book “Outside Over There,” goblins steal a baby whose face, on one page, he told me, is “an exact portrait of the Lindbergh baby.”)

“Brundibar” is a children’s opera, written in 1938 by the Czech composer Hans Krása, with a libretto by Adolf Hoffmeister, a Czech writer and critic. For this production, Kushner adapted the libretto, and the sets were based on Sendak designs. Sendak was nervous about the preview. “Tony called me up, and said, ‘It’s fine.’ I said, ‘I’ll kill myself now.’ “ I’d been watching the rehearsals at Yale, and I told him that one evening the adult actors, listening to the children sing, were so moved that they missed their cues. “They missed their cues?” he said, with alarm.

“Brundibar” came about by chance. In 2000, a friend sent Sendak a recording of Krása’s opera, which had first been performed by the children at the Vinohrady Jewish orphanage, in Prague, in 1942. Later that year, Krása and the children, along with most of the other Jews in Prague, were deported to Terezin, which was run by the Nazis as a “model” camp. Krása staged the opera there fifty-five times; it was also filmed, and scenes were included in a propaganda piece called “The Führer Gives the Jews a City.” The libretto is a fairy tale about tyranny and kindness. Two penniless children, Pepicek and Aninku, try to earn money to buy milk for their sick mother by singing in the street, and are bullied by Brundibar, the local organ-grinder; after a trio of talking animals intercedes, a chorus of little children joins them in song, the coins pour in, and the bully runs off. Of the fifteen thousand children who passed through Terezin on their way to Auschwitz, only a small percentage survived the war.

Immediately, Sendak wanted to do something with the material. In 2001, he collaborated with the dance company Pilobolus on a piece set to music by Krása and others, called “A Selection,” after the roll call at which some prisoners were sent to work and others to their deaths. In “Last Dance,” a film on the making of the piece, Sendak, who can be obstreperous, suggests to the directors, following an afternoon fraught with disagreement, “ ‘Nazis Sending Jews to Be Cooked.’ That’s a good title.”

Sendak asked Kushner to write the text for a picture book based on the opera. In the first set of drawings, Brundibar was Hitler, with a black mustache under a Napoleonic hat. “Children’s literature, like the theatre, is telling stories with pictures,” Kushner said. “In every conversation, Maurice produces something devastating. He’ll kill me for saying this, but there is a quality in him that I find in a lot of Jewish people of his generation. It’s amazing how much he has learned from reality.” Sendak said recently, “Children know about death and sorrow and sadness. ‘Brundibar’ is about how children know that.”

The sets for “Brundibar” were designed by Kris Stone. (As a child, she was obsessed with Max’s room. She told me, “My friends are artists. When I see an installation sprouting grass, I think, Maurice!”) Stone went through the book and found images—a little porch with scallops, a bucket belonging to Aninku—and when she couldn’t find what she needed she used other Sendak images: the sky is from the Glyndebourne Opera production of “Where the Wild Things Are”; the moon is from a cover that Sendak did for this magazine in 1993. “In Terezin, the original set was very simple—a plank fence, a platform—but they did it that way because they were in Terezin,” Stone said. “This is a universe he’s dreamed. I think that a story in which children save their mother is very important, now, to that imaginative universe.”

At the Yale Repertory, when the curtain came down, the audience was in tears. I went backstage with my six-year-old daughter. Sendak showed her the perch from which the beautiful yellow bird had flown down, and the painted bench where Pepicek and Aninku slept. Although the adults I spoke to about Sendak have often found him irascible, with a child he was gently attentive. (Later, he asked me, more than once, “Did she like it?”) Then he said, to the waiting cast, “Thank you. That was wonderful. This was for Hans Krása. He only got one chance, and now you’ve given it back to him.”

Sendak was born on June 10, 1928, in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, the third child of Philip and Sarah Sendak, Polish Jews who met in New York when Philip heard Sarah reading aloud a story by Sholem Aleichem. Philip worked in the garment industry, as a pleater. Maurice and his sister, Natalie, and his brother, Jack, were born on the dining-room table. Maurice, who was called Murray, was a sickly child. His grandmother made him a white suit of clothes, so that when the Angel of Death passed over the house he would not be taken: according to her, only angels wore white (Max’s wolf suit is white as well). When he was very small, a photograph of his maternal grandfather hung over his bed; one morning, he awoke from a fever to find that the picture was gone. During the night, he had stood up and spoken to the picture, and his mother, convinced that her father was persuading him to come to the land of the dead, had ripped up the photograph. After she died, Sendak and his sister found the torn pieces packed away in a closet. (Sendak had the picture restored, and it now hangs over his bed.)

Sendak believes that Sarah suffered from depression. He recalled, “My mother had no ups. There was no pleasure in her life. Feeling sorry for her was my childhood.” The one time that Maurice asked another child over to his house, his friend found Sarah strange, and asked, “Is that your mother?” Maurice said no.

Philip Sendak was more voluble—in old age, he dictated a book of tales from his childhood that Sendak illustrated, called “In Grandpa’s House”—but his storytelling often cloaked an emotional violence. He told Maurice that before he was born Sarah had stood on a bench; Philip had repeatedly pushed her off, in an effort to terminate the pregnancy. “I would listen in fascination,” Sendak recalls. “To him, it was a funny story.” When Sendak repeats a line he finds ridiculous, he draws his circumflex brows together and raises his voice to a high-pitched squeak.

Was it the bench in the barn? I asked.

“No, it was not the bench in the barn!” he said.

Natalie gave him his first book, “The Prince and the Pauper.” With Jack, he wrote and illustrated picture books. (Jack, who in later years worked at a post office, also wrote several books for children, two of which were illustrated by Maurice.) Every week, Natalie and Jack took him to a double feature. He was in love with Mickey Mouse. “When Mickey appeared on the screen, I would stand on my seat and scream,” he told me. “The fun was how not nice he was. In the beginning, he had teeth; he makes a Wild Thing look like Shirley Temple.” Mickey became the subject of his first finished drawing.

When Maurice wasn’t at school, which he detested, or at the movies, he spent most of his time sitting at a window that looked out on the street, drawing. His first book, “Kenny’s Window,” published in 1956, is about a boy who sits by his window and answers a series of dreamlike questions (“What is an only goat?”; “Do you always want what you think you want?”). He had recently read “One Little Boy,” by Dorothy Baruch, a psychoanalyst who was doing early work with autistic children. The boy’s name was Kenneth. Sendak recalled, “I was blindsided by that kid, by his inability to communicate. Kenny’s troubles suggested my childhood to me. I had been that lonely.”

The cartoonist Jules Feiffer, who has known Sendak for fifty years, told me, “How close as adults we can get to the feelings of childhood is a mystery. But Maurice? He’s been able to stay very close. Even the stories he hasn’t written himself he informs and reveals. It’s Chaplin eating his shoe in ‘The Gold Rush.’ It’s depressing, but he lives, by eating that shoe.”

Sendak’s book “The Sign on Rosie’s Door” (1960) is a series of gemlike stories about a little girl in Brooklyn who, through personality and imagination, turns a humdrum street into a play by Pirandello, and her friends Sal, Pudgy, and Dolly into players: “I’m Alinda the lost girl,” Rosie says. “Who is going to find you?” Sal asks. “Magic Man.” Sendak said, “I remember them all. I could see right into Rosie’s house. We lived in apartment houses very close to each other. Next door, a little girl, Helen, was being abused. My sister and I would listen. Afterward, Helen would go down and play in the street. The doors were wide open. Everything was in code.”

In the nineteen-seventies, Sendak went back to his old neighborhood with a camera crew, and knocked on Rosie’s door. The person living there turned out to be Rosie’s cousin. She gave Sendak a telephone number for Rosie, who still lived in the neighborhood, and he called her. “I said, ‘Rosie, I’m the guy who used to be in the window.’ And she said, ‘Yeah, I remember, what were you doing?’ And I said, ‘I was drawing, and making things up about you.’ “

When Sendak was a teen-ager, the family moved four blocks away—“It could have been across the ocean.” By then, their apartment was full of photographs of Sendak cousins in Poland—of newlyweds, of babies—who had been sent to concentration camps. Natalie’s fiancé was killed in the war. Sendak said, “From that moment, I automatically began to take care of her. It became my full-time job.” Every August, the family went for two weeks to Charlie’s, a kosher hotel in the Catskills. In 1944, Jack was missing in the Philippines. That summer, Maurice befriended a girl named Pearl—her brother, too, was missing in action—and gave her his 1939 World’s Fair ring. Jack eventually returned but, the next spring, Maurice received a postcard saying that Pearl was dead. “There was something wrong with her back; her mother had put her in the hospital for an operation she didn’t want, that didn’t help, and she caught an infection and died,” he said. “You can die when you’re a child, that’s what I knew. Pearl was my Anne Frank.” The dedication for “The Sign on Rosie’s Door” reads, “Remembering Pearl Karchawer / and all the Rosies / and Brooklyn.”

In 1946, Sendak graduated from Lafayette High School, where he had contributed cartoons to the school newspaper, and went to work at All-American Comics, drawing backgrounds for “Mutt and Jeff.” He moved to the West Village, and studied with the painter John Groth at the Art Students League. “He’d say, ‘Do a drawing of Marlon Brando fucking Vivien Leigh in “Streetcar.” Do a Goya drawing, and do a Daumier drawing.’ “ Sendak taught himself to draw animals at the Central Park Zoo.

He was offered a job painting window displays at F. A. O. Schwarz. Frances Chrystie, the children’s-book buyer for the store, was a friend of the editor Ursula Nordstrom, of Harper & Brothers, whose list included Laura Ingalls Wilder and Margaret Wise Brown. Chrystie arranged for Sendak to meet her, and that led to his first assignment as an illustrator, for “The Wonderful Farm,” by Marcel Aymé. When Ruth Kraus, another Harper & Brothers author, saw Sendak’s sketchbooks, she insisted that he do the drawings for her manuscript “A Hole Is to Dig: A First Book of First Definitions.” The definitions—“A face is so you can make faces,” “Dogs are to kiss people”—had been contributed by nursery-school children. Sendak recalls, “She was writing the most original postwar books in America, but no one paid any attention, because they were ‘children’s books.’ She was very strict with me. She said about my pictures, ‘Why is she doing this, and he’s doing that? Why can’t she do that and he this?’ There are more hermaphrodite children in ‘A Hole Is to Dig’ than in any other work of literature!”

Published in 1952, the book brought a flood of commissions. Soon Sendak was illustrating between four and six books a year, a surge of productivity that included, in 1957, the first Little Bear book. (“It was fascinating to watch him learn how to draw,” di Capua said. “ ‘A Hole Is to Dig’ is a triumph of experience over ability, but, in the Little Bear books, you see his draftsmanship magically evolving, until, in the last one, the illustrations are darkly exquisite.”) In 1962 came the “Nutshell Library,” which Sendak both wrote and illustrated, a set of four tiny books—“Alligators All Around,” “Chicken Soup with Rice,” “One Was Johnny,’’ and “Pierre”—housed in a three-inch-by-four-inch slipcase. Disobedient Pierre, whose reply to every question is “I don’t care,” is a forerunner of Max.

Pierre’s fate—he is gobbled by a hungry lion—was recalled to me frequently during my own recalcitrant childhood, and when we were walking through the woods I mentioned this to Sendak. He stopped and poked at an ice-bound rock with his cane, his face a mask of guilt and concern. “But he was fine! The lion threw him up.”

The year after the “Nutshell Library” appeared, Sendak published “Where the Wild Things Are.” Publishers Weekly, while praising the “frightening” illustrations, noted that they accompanied “a pointless and confusing story”; a librarian reviewer wrote, “It is not a book to be left where a sensitive child may come upon it at twilight.” The book won the Caldecott Medal for the best picture book of 1963, but Sendak encountered the same mixture of condemnation and approbation with the publication, in 1970, of “In the Night Kitchen,” in which a naked, gleeful little boy called Mickey narrowly avoids being made into a cake. Even into the nineteen-nineties, because of Mickey’s nakedness, it was routinely banned from school libraries, but it now sells almost as many copies per year as “Where the Wild Things Are.”

“The book I didn’t like,” Sendak said, was his 1959 edition of Hans Christian Andersen. “For me, he’s too morbid. Why did the little mermaid have to bleed? Why did the girl with the red shoes have to die? I didn’t know enough to stay away from it.” He added, “I don’t believe in punishment. Who in life gets punished? Not Pierre. In my books, Max is the only one who, in reality, does do damage. He pushes it too far. His mother is in emotional disorder, and he’s pushing her to the limit. He knows her, and she punishes him. In the end, this will happen three times a week until he goes into therapy.” At the same time, Sendak’s friend Philip Roth was exploring a grownup counterpart of Max in Neil Klugman, in “Goodbye, Columbus,” and Alexander Portnoy, in “Portnoy’s Complaint,” as was, in a minor key, J. D. Salinger—Kenny and Rosie coming of age—in his stories of the Glass family. Sendak continued, “We were all feeling hot. I brought to the industry the rebellious kid, because I came with a particular disregard for what a children’s book was supposed to be. My God, Max would be what now, forty-eight? He’s still unmarried, he’s living in Brooklyn. He’s a computer maven. He’s totally ungifted. He wears a wolf suit when he’s at home with his mother!”

In 1967, Sendak, then thirty-nine, suffered a near-fatal heart attack, the result of a childhood fever that had weakened his heart. On hearing of his illness, Else Holmelund Minarik sat down and wrote “A Kiss for Little Bear.” Michael di Capua recalls that she thought that if she wrote another Little Bear book Sendak would live. In the story, the picture that Little Bear paints to give to his grandmother is of a Wild Thing. “ ‘Collaboration’ is an important word to Maurice,” Arthur Yorinks told me. “He’s done it with writers, and then with himself, as an artist and a writer.”

Over the years, Sendak had been approached many times by people who wanted to make a movie version of “Where the Wild Things Are.” Only Spike Jonze and Dave Eggers, he says, showed any imagination. Jonze said, “What I’ve learned about Maurice is that, however wise he is, he’s a kid. He’s sad, he’s enraged. He gets frustrated. When he gets angry, he bites back. Conversation with him is raw.”

Sendak has shared the Ridgefield house for many years with his partner, Eugene Glynn, a New York psychiatrist who specializes in the treatment of adolescents. About rural life, Sendak says, “You know, I always knew I was going to leave New York. I had an accumulated yearning for the country. In ‘Dark Victory,’ Bette Davis went to the country to die. What I didn’t know is that if you fall down in the road in Connecticut the owls pick your eyes out.” Sendak suffers from insomnia, so he rises late. He tries to work every day. He spends a lot of time listening to music and reading, and he watches TV and movies that Spike Jonze sends him, which he usually hates. He likes to talk on the telephone: every Sunday, he speaks to his friend the choreographer Twyla Tharp for more than an hour. Every day, he goes for a long walk with his German shepherd, Herman—named for Melville—one of a long line of Sendak dogs, the most important of whom was Jennie, a white Sealyham terrier. Jennie is the heroine of “Higglety Pigglety Pop!” and is chased by Max in “Where the Wild Things Are.”

Sendak’s house is low-ceilinged and comfortable. A hallway leads to the sitting room, where there are two toy Borden’s milk trucks on top of a bookcase. One of them was made by Lynn Caponera, who has been running Sendak’s household for almost thirty years, since she was eighteen. Her name, like Jennie’s, appears on marquees and signs throughout his books. Perched on a settee is a Rosie doll, wearing a red dress and black boa, which was produced after “The Sign on Rosie’s Door” was made into a film, with music by Carole King, in 1975.

At lunch, we sat at a table crowded with memorabilia: a King Kong coaster, a postcard of Caravaggio’s “Beheading of St. John the Baptist,” and a solid-silver Mickey Mouse from the hood of a Ford. A garland of Mickey Mouse paper dolls hangs from a white wrought-iron chandelier. Sendak said, “You have to have the right people around.” He also owns a Charlie Chaplin figure, given to him by the poet Marianne Moore, who was a neighbor of his on West Ninth Street; in the nineteen-seventies, Sendak would visit Moore and read aloud to her.

We were eating an apple crisp, and Sendak suddenly moved his fork from his right hand to his left hand. “This is delicious,” he said. “See, look, if I like something I switch to my left hand.” As a child, he was hit with a ruler for using his left hand; he draws with his right.

Robin Shane, the costume designer for “Brundibar,” had said to me, “The opera should look like what people think the book looks like. Maurice always says that in his drawings the moon is the face of his mother.” I asked Sendak about this. “It’s true,” he said. “The moon is always there. I must have it. My mother had a round, white face. She was always watching for me.” He paused, then said, “Yeah, she’s there saying, ‘Murray, don’t put your feet in the gutter—not one foot! ’ The moon is purity and love.”

I said, “But you didn’t feel that way about your mother.”

Sendak barked back, “If I had a real mother and she made me happy, and a real father who made me happy, I would be working in the computer store with Max.”

A week after the preview of “Brundibar” in New Haven, Sendak was sitting at the big table in the barn. An old oil painting of his was propped up in one corner. He said, “It’s an early attempt. The figure is by Bruegel, the trees are by Goya. See how the Angel of Death has raised its sword over the old man? I could have stopped right there! The other day, a woman called me up—she had read something I said recently—and said, ‘Maurice, you sound like you’ve overcome your frightful nightmares!’ But what could have made her think that?”

Sendak had been on the phone all morning with Spike Jonze, who was trying to persuade him to come to California: “ ‘Maurice!’ he tells me. ‘You can stay at the Bel-Air! ’ Spike keeps sending me these sketches. It’s driving me crazy.” He put a piece of tracing paper over a Wild Thing that Jonze had sent him, and began to redraw its face, making the grin more affable and fixing the pupil in its lunatic eye. “Look at this! It looks like a victim of avian flu!”

We walked back up to the house with Herman, and made some tea in the kitchen. On the wall of the studio is a photograph by Lewis Carroll, of Alice Liddell as a young woman. Sendak said, “I like to think that he was angry at her for growing up: to get even, he took the picture when she slumped.” On the desk was a reproduction of a skeleton of a Siamese-twin baby. On a shelf was a snapshot of Sendak as a boy, with Jack and Natalie. (Jack died, of cancer, in 1995; Natalie died, at eighty-five, in 2004.) Spread out on the drafting table is the working dummy for a new picture book, “Bumble-Ardy,” an exuberant rhyme about a child who is finally allowed to celebrate a birthday when he turns nine.

“What I love is reading,” Sendak said, sitting down at the table. “And air. Air when at night you open the window by your bed and the curtain lifts. Late at night, I am reading ‘The Awkward Age.’ James is poisonous. He is venomous. What I am doing now is wrestling. Do you know that beautiful letter that John Keats wrote to his brother about the making of a soul, the soul of the artist? I don’t want to draw the soul. I just want to be in that life. I don’t want to be a monster.”

He raised his eyebrows, and said, “When my brother Jack died, I wanted to do something extraordinary for him. Five years later, I had an idea. The poem I wrote was very dark. I hope to finish it. But even if I don’t finish it, or publish it, I did it. James’s question is ‘Why do you live?’ “ He paused. “The illustrations keep bubbling out.” ♦